Last week we had a couple over for dinner and the woman, a friend of my girlfriend I’d met many times before, was, unbeknownst to me, a fly-fishing apex predator. I still have trouble catching anything but rocks with my rod, but she showed up with an entire cooler filled with 8 whole brook trout,…
Dryad Saddle | Pheasant Back | Cerioporus squamosus
It's important to get dryad saddle mushrooms when they're young as they get tough quickly.
Dryad saddle or pheasant back mushrooms are a very common spring mushroom that take a little technique to get right. They have a special flavor too, and if you're a mushroom enthusiast like me, you'll love them. To get the hang of cooking and preparing them down, refer to my basic guide to dryad saddles. If you have some to cook, try them in ramen, pickles, or as a simple side dish.
Pheasant Back-Spring Vegetable Soup
Here’s a great recipe to celebrate some of the young growing plants of spring: a simple, brothy soup made from green garlic or wild onions, pheasant back mushrooms, a spring shoot/vegetable of your choice (I used fiddleheads and elm samaras) wild rice or another grain, and a little meat broth or whatever you have on…
White Wine Pheasant Backs
My old chef and I were out morel hunting in a new spot in Wisconsin this week, and, unfortunately, we got skunked. Thankfully there were a few old-timers on the same patch of land who hunt it every year who came up empty handed too, so I didn’t feel too bad. As is pretty common…
Pheasant Back Fermented Shoyu
Prime pheasant back / dryad saddle season is usually about over after the spring chicken of the woods pop, but just because they’re big and tough as nails doesn’t mean you can’t do anything with them, and pheasant back shoyu is a great example, especially if you like edible science projects. Shoyu and it’s cousin…
Meatball Stew with Pheasant Backs and Campion
Meatball stew with pheasant back mushrooms and campion is a dish I came up with after I’d been reading about campion, and how it, and it’s relatives (mostly Silene vulgaris and Silene inflata) are used widely in Mediterranean cooking. The recipe itself is a sort of hodge-podge of different ingredients you might see in European…
Braised Burdock and Wild Mushrooms
Ever since I figured out a reasonably efficient way to dig burdock roots, I’ve been eating it every which way. Kinpira was my real breakthrough. Sure, I opened up a restaurant featuring burdock as a local ingredient, but back then I cooked it like a European would, generally with dairy, which is fine, but the…
Basic Dryad Saddle / Pheasant Back Broth
After morel season as we get into summer, the pheasant back / dryad saddle / Cerioporus squamosus will still be out, not in the staggering numbers we see during the height of the late spring season, but still out and plentiful. They’re not spring mushrooms though, and finding tender, succulent ones is far more difficult…
Wild Shoot Salad with Dryad Saddles and Wild Mint
Here’s a great, off-the-beaten path salad I did for episode 2 of The Wild Harvest, my online series with James Beard Award winning filmmaker Jesse Roesler. The salad itself is great, but mores to me it’s a statement about how we perceive vegetables in general, specifically shoot vegetables. When you think of a shoot, what…
Nettle Pancakes with Goat Cheese and Wild Mushrooms
Wait, nettle what? Yep, stinging nettle pancakes. Savory pancakes were a vegetarian standby at a couple different restaurants I worked at, and Chef Russell Klein of James Beard nominated Meritage in St. Paul ran a version of them on their menu that often stayed most of the year, changing up the flavors as the seasons…
Dryad Saddles with Garlic, Soy, and Onion Greens
A quick saute of dryad saddles (Cerioporus squamosus / pheasant back) with garlic, soy and a healthy handful of onion leaves is probably my new favorite way to eat these spring mushrooms that are so abundant during morel season, and especially nice to see when the morels are hiding. Their flavor is so funky and…
Asparagus and Fiddleheads with Shaved Dryad Saddle
This week I’ve been working on a side that evokes spring and also happens to be a great way to use those dryad saddles/pheasant back mushrooms that come up with abandon in the Spring. I was in the kitchen wondering what to do with some fiddleheads Hidden Stream Farm brought me, and I wound up…
Dryad Saddle Relish
It’s springtime again, and with it comes the onslaught of Dryad Saddle, a.k.a Pheasant Back mushrooms here in Minnesota. With so many fresh ingredients available at once, I often preserve things to make sure everything gets used and to save time and shelf life of stuff I’ve worked so hard to pick. This preserve I…
Dryad Saddle Ramen
It was a bad year for morels for me. There’s a couple kids speaking an Eastern European language that raid the patch in the morning, looking for the”smorchki”. If having children with 1000 generations of mushroom hunting in their veins picking my favorite patch wasn’t bad enough, there’s a groundskeeper that’s found that patch too…